Super-affluent hip-hop stars expose hedonism’s intrinsic hollowness

Evidence

A secret sadness lurks behind the twenty-first-century’s forced smile. This sadness concerns hedonism itself, and it’s perhaps in hip-hop — the genre that has been most oriented to pleasure over the past twenty-odd years — where this melancholy has registered most deeply. Drake and Kanye West are both morbidly fixated on exploring the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism. No longer motivated by hip-hop’s drive to conspicuously consume — they long ago acquired anything they could have wanted — Drake and West instead dissolutely cycle through easily available pleasures, feeling a combination of frustration, anger, and self-disgust, aware that something is missing, but unsure exactly what it is. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1306

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the essay on sacrifice and the ritual meanings of self-destruction — Drake and West’s dissolute cycling is the secularised, individualised shadow of collective ritual expenditure.
• SEED: Fisher sketches the ‘sadness of having everything’ theme here — an article angle on luxury-addiction and affluence melancholy across hip-hop, reality TV, and wellness culture would write itself.
• XREF: connects to: The same hip hop lyric can pair political commentary with vacuous conspicuous consumption — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street…, 348; Hip-hop moguls stayed silent on OWS while selling wealth-maximalist luxury — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 223; Pop hedonism’s forced uplift masks a depression it cannot dissipate — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1305 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The same hip hop lyric can pair political commentary with vacuous conspicuous consumption #qualifies (0.75) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 348
• Hip-hop moguls stayed silent on OWS while selling wealth-maximalist luxury #exemplifies (0.70) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 223